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One of my patients, I"ll call her "Cathie", a heroic woman in her 50's whom I'd been seeing for a while, told me the following story last week. Cathie's daughter had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer when the daughter was a year and a half old. She was almost two when she began chemotherapy. One day Cathie took her daughter for a picnic at the beach and Cathie noticed that the strong off-shore wind began blowing clumps of her daughter's hair right off her head. When her daughter saw the look in her mother's eyes, she became frightened and started to cry, but she didn't want to leave 'pinnick'. So Cathie watched almost all of her daughter's hair blow off, as well as her eyebrows. As a tear came down each cheek, Cathie said to me "I was glad I could hold her and kiss away her tears- but I had no one to hold me".

Cathie's family had gone away long ago. Cathie and her brothers and sisters had been sexually molested for years by an alcoholic and mentally ill father. And Cathie's husband left her shortly after the daughter's birth. Her story touched me deeply and, as my own eyes filled, I wondered what it was that so moved me. I think it's the same thing that so profoundly touches me with so many of my patients: the basic fragility of our existence, all of us.

In Naomi Shihab Nye's great poem "Kindness", she urges us to open our hearts "to the fact that everything we cherish will pass out of our lives". The author, Roger Housden, says that when we come to know this truth "as a lived experience, we shall also know a deep love and kindness", because everyone is on the same road. Someone else's pain and suffering are also our own. And when we experience that shared pain, it joins us to humanity.

So, I think the reason my own eyes filled when I heard Cathie's story was, really, that her pain was also mine- not that I had been through the same life circumstances, but that suffering is a noble truth familiar to all of us. Despite what Cathie had been through, both growing up and, then, as a young mother, she was able to be totally present for her daughter and for herself on the beach that day. And in my office, she had enough courage to allow herself to be "held" by her therapist. And me, I have the privelege to witness every day this inspiring will to live.

I hope that you will all take 3 minutes to listen to a heart-warming story that begins:

So I get off the train and I'm walking towards the stairs and this young teenager pulls out a knife. He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him here you go.He starts to leave and as he's walking away I'm like, hey, wait a minute, you forgot something.If you're gonna be robbing people for the rest of the night you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.